August Books

*The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown is a NYT bestseller and “an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in the most desperate of times.”  Reminiscent of Unbroken and Dead Wake who also plumb the same era with engaging prose and meticulous historical research, the Boys are  working class students at UWash  who surprise the world by defeating the elite teams of the East Coast, Great Britain, and eventually the best of Hitler’s German athletes. 

H is for Hawk by Helen MacDonald is an award-winning UK best-seller about how a young girl became an experienced falconer who copes with grief from the death of her father by training a dangerous goshawk. While providing a little more than I needed about the history and techniques of falconry, there’s a parallel examination of T.H. White's eccentric falconry. A meditation on “Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir,” clearly the work of a true British intellectual.

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee features many of the characters from To Kill a Mockingbird some twenty years later.  Recently ‘discovered’ by her attorney, the book distracts significantly from the reputation of the author (and some of fiction’s favorite characters) while showings that, possessing talent in her twenties, Lee needed (and received with Mockingbird), the firm hand of a good editor. The image of Atticus as a rationalizing racist was too much for me to handle.

**The Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll is a “riveting debut novel” that blends elements of Gone Girl, Harriet Alger and Primates of Park Avenue. Ani is determined to create the perfect life--husband, home, and career--until an incident from the past threatens to unravel everything. Knoll has a keen eye and finely tuned ear for the challenges of competing on Philadelphia’s Main Line or Manhattan’s East Side. 

 *Let’s Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties by Patricia Marx, former writer for SNL and the New Yorker is “equal parts sarcasm, silliness and smarts.” (NPR). Her self-deprecating riffs on memory lapses-- looking for glasses while wearing them or asking, "Who's the guy who isn't Robert De Niro?" --are reminiscent of Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing and lots of fun for anyone willing to admit that their brain doesn’t function as well as we think it once did.

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July Books

The Angel’s Game by Carlos Ruis Zafó  "takes us into a dark, gothic universe …and creates a breathtaking adventure of intrigue, romance, and tragedy.” Blending deft, evocative writing with a bit of magic realism, Zafón keeps the reader turning pages, but in the end, the truffles don’t make for a satisfying meal.

The Fixer by bestselling author, Joseph Finder, is a story of  a investigative reporter who loses his job, fiancée, and apartment and has to move back and renovate the home of his miserable youth. He finds millions hidden in the walls and sets out to learn the secrets of his comatose father who turns out to have  been a “fixer.”  Finder has written good books, but this isn’t one of them.  If he had taken another six months to edit and revise, this could have been much better.

A Tightly Raveled Mind  by Diane Lawson  is a book that Freud might have liked, but I didn’t.   Dr. Nora Goodman is  a sexy forty-something psychoanalyst with a  handful of one-dimensional, neurotic patients who, like their analyst,  can't seem to allow themselves happiness, love, or success. I liked the descriptions of San Antonio and some of the psychobabble as Lawson  tried to blend crime-solving and psychoanalytic understanding of unconscious mental  processes.

Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman is the disjointed story of Tooly Zylberberg and her Dickensian, peripatetic life. Covering three continents and switching back and forth  over thirty year, the novel left me more confused than the reviewer who gave it high praise. The SF Chronicle called it, “inventive… full of wonderfully quirky, deeply flawed, but lovable characters.”

*The Book Seller by Cynthia Swanson gives Kitty Miller the opportunity to experience both paths in Frost’s “Roads Not Taken.”  She has come to accept her unconventional single life and loves the little bookshop she runs with her best friend, Frieda.  Then, she starts having realistic dreams about a different life involving a great husband, beautiful children and different challenges. Reminiscent of Sliding Doors “The Bookseller is a delightful and haunting exploration of identity, love and loss. ..written with great style and compassion.”

Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo was called a “ perfectly pitched thriller" (Sunday Mirror)  Perhaps, but I found it to be a terse, dark, introspective  first person account about the work life and musings of Olav, a contract killer for a ruthless crime boss.  Beneath the murders and other failed criminal efforts, Olav has a heart of gold, if only he didn’t have a bad childhood and dyslexia.  Don’t look for a happy ending.

June Books

*The Harder They Come by T.C. Boyle returns to his trademark description of  destructive misfits with individualism as a central theme. A seventy-year-old Vietnam vet  returns home after killing a Costa Rican  armed robber to find that his  schizophrenic fragile son  Adam is involved with an older woman dedicated to a right-wing anarchist group.  Adam imagines himself a modern mountain man and shoots two people, leading to a major, eerily contemporary, manhunt. My favorite Boyle book since Tortilla Curtain. 

*The Three Roosevelts: Patrician Leaders Who Transformed America by James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn is a political biography of the intertwined lives of Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor Roosevelt, who emerged New York's Knickerbocker elite to become the most prominent American political family of the twentieth century. While building on Burns’ concept of transformational leadership, there is little new insights on leadership or history in its  almost thousand pages.  Still,  it is an interesting view of how the Roosevelt family dominated the first half of the 20^th century with more impact than the Bush’s and Clinton’s managed in more recent times.

**Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lufthansa  by Eric Larson, “ one of the modern masters of popular narrative nonfiction”--.a resourceful researcher and a subtle storyteller places the world’s fastest and most opulent passenger ship and the deadly German U-boat as protagonists in a thrilling suspense tale even if you already know the outcome.  Larson draws on telegrams, war logs, love letters, and survivor depositions to provide  intriguing details about things you didn't know you need to know...”Thrilling, dramatic and powerful."

Life After Life by Jill McCorkle explore the capacity for self-discovery at any age (from twelve-year-old Abby to eighty-five-year-old Sadie). The residents, staff, and neighbors of a North Carolina retirement center  share their secret memories and life’s  profound discoveries in a somewhat disjointed meditation on life, death, and dying.

May Books

And Sometimes I Wonder About You  by Walter Mosley is a mediocre book by a good writer. In the 5^th Leonid McGill  novel, the short, irresistible, unstoppable, African American (he describes the skin tones of ever character in the novel) detective who  is investigating the murder of a client he initially refused to help.  “Leonid navigates difficult personal elements in his own life while uncovering dark secrets about the victim's old-money family and its missing heiress.”

The Stranger by Harlan Coben, “NYT bestselling master of suspense, delivers his most shocking thriller yet.” Adam Price learns a devastating secret about his wife, Corinne, but when he confronts her, the mirage of their  perfect life seems to disappear as if it never existed. The plot is contrived  and the book has far too many incomplete sentences, but I read this escapist novel in one day.

*The Last Bookaneer is by Matthew Pearl, “the reigning king of popular literary historical thrillers.” In the late 19^th century, two literary pirates (bookaneers) are seeking manuscripts to steal and are caught up in a colonial war in Samoa as they compete for Robert Louis Stevenson's last manuscript and try to make a fortune before a new international copyright treaty ends their  trade. Although described as “a page-turning journey to the heart of a lost era,” the storyline seems a bit stretched and slow going at points.

*The Sixth Extension: An Unnatural History by  Elizabeth Kolbert draws on the work of geologists, botanists, marine biologists, and others to explain the discovery and impact of  five devastating mass extinctions on Earth.  In a NYT “10 Best Books of the year, she explains, in a way that I can almost understand,  why we are in the 6^th periods of major species losses  in the history of the universe. “A major book about the future of the world, blending intellectual and natural history and field reporting into a powerful account.”

The Heart Has Its Reasons by Maria Duenas is a tale of a Madrid  professor who seemed to have it all until her husband suddenly left her. To escape, she accepts a  research grant in California involving an exiled Spanish writer who died decades ago. Trying to leave her own troubled life behind, she becomes enmeshed in some eternal issues of love, academics and middle-age.